


portrait of a four-part soul

by thepaperbones



Series: Your Server Gave Me Trauma [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Gen, Ghost Wilbur Soot, Hopeful Ending, Insane Wilbur Soot, Minor Violence, Moral Ambiguity, Stabbing, Traitor Wilbur Soot, Wilbur Soot Angst, Wilbur Soot and Technoblade and TommyInnit are Siblings, Wilbur Soot and Technoblade are Siblings, Wilbur Soot-centric, and it fucked me up in a good way, god the wilbur brainrot goes hard, haha wilbur soot go brr, i thought about this for too long in the shower, little to no beta we perish like wilbur in thi sver y fic, yes this is shitty all of it was written at 1 am on different days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:00:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28831602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepaperbones/pseuds/thepaperbones
Summary: Who am I? He wonders. There are a few pleasant moments that bubble up at the surface of his mind - a photo of him and Tommy, honey bottles and golden afternoons with Tubbo, bedraggled and broken feathers and a wax burn and Techno, and a hand outstretched through years of unconditional love from Phil. Ghostbur reaches further and regrets it. He recoils away from the bad things, and soon they disappear altogether. There, all better.
Relationships: Floris | Fundy & Wilbur Soot, Niki | Nihachu & Wilbur Soot, No Romantic Relationship(s), Toby Smith | Tubbo & Wilbur Soot, Wilbur Soot & Phil Watson, Wilbur Soot & Technoblade, Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Series: Your Server Gave Me Trauma [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2207355
Comments: 2
Kudos: 41





	portrait of a four-part soul

**Author's Note:**

> heehoo i just retold canon but with a lil bit of narrative i made up woo imagine writing sbi consistently couldn't be me but yeah no song inspos for this one other than like i looped "it's all so incredibly loud" by glass animals while writing it and it sorta fits "photographs (you are taking now)" by damon albarn. anyway! character study pls enjoy. ALSO! uhh permissions n shit if the urge strikes u to make content abt this fic (art, podfic, mosaics, whatever) go right ahead as for like visibility pls don't dono abt it to ccs or shove it in their faces or anything but if u wanna tweet abt it or just share it beyond ao3 go nuts w that! dsmp spoilers for 11/16 and beyond lol

It’s all falling apart together, then, the way he orchestrated things. He hears the cries of his people in the distance and his weary mind makes orchestras of a maelstrom. _His L’manberg,_ distantly, cries out for him _._ He sings a few notes in response, stringing along the harmonies of _an unfinished symphony, forever unfinished_. 

It’s been decided then. As the captain goes down with the ship, so will he fall with the country he birthed of rebellion and wars and explosions. _If he cannot have it, neither will anyone else_. 

Phil stands before him. There are tombstones in the reflection of his father’s eyes. 

This time will be no different. 

He recites the words like he’s heard them a million times before. Maybe he has. 

“Kill me, Phil, Phil, _kill_ me-” here he hands his father the _sword_ , a bloodstained destiny falling into place.

His poor father. 

“Phil, stab me with the sword, murder me, ki-kill me.” Deep breaths, now. He will die unflinching.

_Wear white to my funeral, Angel of Death_ , he sings hazily in his mind.

“Kill me, Phil. Murder me. Look, they all _want_ you to.” It’s true. Even now he can imagine their anguish, their grief, their _anger_ , a thousand gleaming stainless steel hearts turning on him. Things are shining too brightly, now.

“I can’t,” Phil grinds out, and Wilbur tilts his head loopily.

“You’re my _son_!” 

Wilbur’s heart bleeds a little at this (preemptively, perhaps). It can’t be easy, having to end the villain you reared yourself. No matter. The show must go on, and Phil is but a small footnote in the history of things. 

“They’ll call you Philza Son Killer. Killza. Killza Minecraft.” It’s all part of the inane song in his head. Damn voices can’t seem to come up with anything cohesive these days. _Killza_ , he laughs, and his lips twist just a fraction in a smirk.

“Phil, _kill_ me!” Can Phil sense it, that desperation in his tone? He’s certain he has to die (the dragon is always slain, the villains destroyed to have their names desecrated for all eternity). 

Phil wavers, if only for a second. Why shouldn’t he, really? His second son has brought the world crumbling down, a nation on its knees, and the gunpowder in the air is testament enough to that. He’ll try one last time, then.

“No matter what you do- no matter what you’ve done-” His father is scrabbling for the words to make things right, like trying to tape up a bullet hole with a bandage. “I can’t-,” Philza Minecraft tries one last time, but there’s a resignedness in the weight of his expression. 

Wilbur’s turn. This conversation has long ended by now in his head, with all the possible arguments laid out neatly like a chessboard. The king appears to be in check.

“Phil,” he begins. “This isn’t- look, _look!_ ” They both take it in, the craters that speckle the land where a _family_ used to be. It’s ugly. Most things are, in war. “Look how much work went into this and it’s _gone!_ ”

He can’t stop a note of hysteria from creeping into his voice, but that should be understandable. Concessions are to be made for dramatic intonation when one is looking upon the ruins of one’s country. L’manberg, the cultivation of every hope he’d ever stored up, as a teenager praying to ambiguous gods just to be a part of something greater than himself. 

“Do it,” Wilbur says firmly. “Do it.” He gives Phil a soft smile. 

And then Phil does. His sword - how many times before has Wilbur seen him use that same sword to kill monsters, dragons, anything that would threaten them? He’s the monster now, it seems. 

The sword slides neatly into his chest, like he’s some sort of meat sheath. It makes comical sense in his head. Wilbur feels the blood, pulsing, dripping, running out of his mouth like it’s looking for escape with the little sigh he breathes out. He supposes he’s dead now. 

His life, disappointingly, flashes before him. They’d always said it would, the voices. How cliche. 

_Grab onto the memories_ , he thinks. _Die a happier man than the traitor they’ll bury you as._

The memories are no neat slideshow. There are only lights with feelings attached to them, swarming him, just begging to drown Wilbur. 

He reaches out. Finds a specific one. It’s blindingly white, white like everything he imagined heaven wasn’t, this heaven he’d known all along that he’d never see.

White, brilliant lights, a memory, a snapshot. He really is drowning now, clinging on. 

_Come back. Show me, he teases. There’s a flash, like a camera in the darkness. It jots down the every crease of his dreamy half-smile even as stone walls bristling with buttons and the writings of a manic soon-to-be corpse melt into cobblestone walls and shadow._

It’s comforting, here. 

“Show me the photo,” Wilbur pouts. In the background, a jukebox peddles out its notes, delicately, like every melody is a glass-stemmed flower. Cobblestone walls, Tommy’s favorite.

“Shut up, big man. Let me just see how ugly you look in this one first, bitch.” 

They both smile, conspirators. There’s a tangible affection, rough-hewn, layered beneath the thin veneer of fierceness. The gleam of Tommy’s brace-encrusted smile, in the dim light of a single dangling light bulb, is a softer flash than that of the camera.

Wilbur’s brother submerges the film in dark water and fishes another one out. Wilbur strains to see it from his position on the narrow bed, but Tommy shields the newly-minted photo with his body. The photo is laid to rest, although not before Tommy, smirking, scrawls something in loopy handwriting with his favorite marker on its back. He presses it onto yellowing map paper and leaves it to dry on the cartography table.

Wilbur, ever curious, waits for Tommy to give his attention to the next photo before slipping the picture from its residence on the table, next to blurry shots of a horse and a candid of their dad. The writing on the back is large, care tucked into every scribble and curlicue. 

“My favorite brother,” Wilbur deadpans aloud. He fights a stupid grin from spreading further across his face. “How nice of you.”

Tommy screeches an indignant, familiar laugh, and reaches for the photo. 

Maybe the moment makes him soft, because he says, gruffly, with all the awkward sentiments of youth: “Well. How could I care about anyone else more?”

“Tommy,” Wilbur smiles. 

“What, no ‘I love you too’? I thought you cared about me!”

All of a sudden the mood shifts, and Tommy’s confused, frantic. 

“I thought you cared about me, Wilbur!” he screams. Tears slide steadily down his face, he’s being dragged away, and the flickering light bulb flashes Wilbur a sliver of white porcelain smile. Wilbur starts up from the bed, reaching out for his brother, but faster than he can move, log walls spring up, guarding muffled mini-explosions, and Tommy becomes nothing more than an oak coffin at the hands of towering dirt spires.

In the instant it takes Wilbur to flinch away, he’s in the room again, his chest studded with dazzling pain. Phil’s stricken face blurs before him. He must be pretty dead now. Reasoning skitters away again, and as children chase dragonflies, he tries to grasp it. It buzzes insistently. 

_Stop that! I can’t catch you._ _Lucid thought flits around him, tantalizingly close. Wilbur grasps it in his hand and finds that it is sweet and golden, even as the truth stings him everywhere he goes._

He has spent too many sweet afternoons here to forget it.

“I just can’t catch you!” Wilbur scowls a lighthearted defeat at retreating antennae, bobbing cheerfully with flight.

“Stop waving at the bees,” Tubbo laughs, “you’ll only scare them away more.”

“Well, tell them to come back. We can’t harvest the honey without bees.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s easy,” his brother’s friend smiles brightly. He retrieves a tulip from his back pocket, its waxen petals still stiff.

The bees crowd him, buzzing around Tubbo’s head like a fuzzy halo. Late afternoon light filters in through the glass roof of the apiary as he dusts each of his bees with pollen, and the way it lights up his visage floods Wilbur with the immense feeling of peace. 

Like it’s been a million years since he last rested. Like this is the last safe place in the world. It is sacred here, among the flowers. Like he could fall asleep in tall grass and Tubbo would let him rest for half an eternity. It is peaceful, this glimpse of a future he was never meant to see. Around him, a thousand flowers sway on lithe stems with the gentle wind. 

Wilbur’s startled from his thoughts by a proffered glass vial. Tubbo stands above him, smiling benevolently. 

“Thanks, Tubbo,” he says faintly, and the shy smile he gets in return assures him that they both know he is grateful for more than thin glass bottles.

“No problem,” Tubbo returns easily, like kindness is cheaper than the dirt they walk on. He’s always been that way. “You know, you always have a safe space here.”

Warmth floods Wilbur. He and his brother’s friend have never been close, but Tubbo’s always been there, reliable. It’s the most constant blessing in their lives.

He walks over to a hive, and taps it with the bottle, collecting a little honey on the rim. 

“Am I doing it right?”

“No, what have you done?” Tubbo asks absently from where he’s constructing yet another beehouse. 

He walks over to Wilbur, and his bees follow, but they’re agitated now, and so is Tubbo.

“What have you done?” Tubbo asks, in a completely different tone of voice. The honey bottles blacken and rot in Wilbur’s hands, and Tubbo’s eyes are guarded now, flickering with barely-restrained terror.

Somehow, his shears have become a crossbow, the end pointed at Tubbo fixedly. 

Tubbo goes up in gunpowder and smoke, and his bees are obsidian now, raining to the ground in showers. The fragrant air is heavy with decay and rot, like three-headed skeletal myths raining destruction, harbingers of a failed president’s death. 

Wilbur’s gasping for air. Things have gone all dark. So this is what it’s like, the descent. The road, he thinks grimly, to hell. Where he belongs. Wilbur had made his peace with that long ago.

_It’s too much. It burns, so badly._ _Hellfire, licking at him, lighting up the darkness with a face for every life he’d taken. Wilbur deserves it. Let it burn him, let the fire consume him at the pyre of his sins. He’d laugh as he was reduced to ashes, as all the good martyrs did._

He was young here, once.

“It burns, so badly,” Wilbur hisses, his face contorted in pain. His nerves are alight with phantom fire, a million billion lit fuses hissing along their strings. 

Above him, his brother’s concerned face. 

“I’m gonna get Phil,” Techno hedges cautiously. 

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Wilbur returns, and this time he screws up his face not at the prominent burn along his arm but at the prospect of a scolding from his father. The feathers drift around him, innocently - the remnants of Phil’s flock of chickens. “He’s going to kill us for what we did to his coop.”

“You’re hurt,” Techno argued exasperatedly. “Phil’s going to care more about his injured son than some stupid chickens.” 

“He’s going to _laugh_ at me for this!” Hot wax speckles Wilbur’s arm, skirting the burn, and he thinks maybe what Icarus experienced is nothing compared to the hot shame coloring his cheeks. 

“As he should. Who in their right mind tries to replicate the Icarus myth anyway?” 

Wilbur scowls, temporarily at a loss. “It’s fine, Techno.”

“It’s not fine! Let me see.” 

He jerks his injured arm away from his twin and ignores the equally injured look on Technoblade’s face. “Stop it! Why the hell do you care so much, anyway?”

“You’re my brother, Will! Like it or not, I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth to save you from yourself.”

Wilbur goes silent. He’s sullen, but he allows Techno to inspect the injury and to call Phil over.

Phil does laugh, just a little bit, but somehow it doesn’t hurt as much as he expected. 

“You wanted to be the hero again,” Techno smirks, knowingly. Wilbur looks up from his bandages to give him a wan smile. 

He’s just a beat too late to catch the shift into cold fury. 

“You just wanted to be the hero again,” Techno repeats, this time menacingly. His form shifts, and for a few seconds Wilbur sees not Techno his brother, Techno his twin, but Technoblade the blood god, champion of the unavenged, savage and tusked and drenched, head to toe, in crimson. 

This is the warrior Techno, the one everyone fears. The Techno who topples nations and kills gods. Wilbur can’t really bring himself to be too afraid. 

Techno swings his axe and Wilbur lets his eyes close. His brother, the final executioner he’ll ever face. It doesn’t hurt as much when you’re already dead.

_Just a little more time. A few stolen moments, please. Just one last memory, snatched out of time. Stolen like fingers lean with an impoverished youth, too clumsy and too late to pull away._

This is where it all begins.

He pulls his hand back a beat too late, as a man with straw hair and lime-striped clothes catches him in the act. 

“And what are you doing?” asks Philza Minecraft, destroyer of worlds, angel of death, and tamer of the End. He’s more amused than angry - that much is evident in the broad, relaxed planes of his face.

Wilbur juts his chin out. He’s well aware that the penalty for thievery is death. He is also aware that it is much better to go to your death defiant than meek and wretched. 

“What does it look like, old man?” young Wilbur challenges. Phil sees the fire in his eyes, like brimstone and nether wastes and recognizes it as one like his own. 

“Come home with me,” Phil says, and this younger Wilbur scoffs to think of a strange house with cold walls and colder floors as a home (later he’d swear he’d never dream of living anywhere else). But he _does_ , and Wilbur watches twenty years pass in the space between two slowing heartbeats - a snarky rebel who thought he knew it all at fifteen becomes cynical but affectionate at eighteen, and then later confident as a leader, a general, at twenty-three. 

He sees other moments, too, plucked out of time as it all drains from his head breath by dying breath. Carrying an infant Fundy in one arm with a sheet of fresh-baked bread emerging from the oven in the other hand, a fierce kind of love and pride drips from him molasses-thick and honey-sweet. Drinking in the infinitely blue sky like his very soul is parched of its artistry, with the feather-light clouds for dessert and a thousand soft blades of meadowy grass to lull him to sleep. His guitar, solid and faithfully polished oak to the last, weaving melodies into the air just because he _can_. Afternoons spent laughing with Niki next to an oven or pink dyed hair and sparring with Techno. Memories, each one a fragment of the life of a leader, a brother, a son, a father, a friend, pass, and each one occurs in a lifespan and the blink of an eye all at once. 

_Requiescat in pace Wilbur Soot_ , he thinks, and prepares to go to his grave a contented man. 

Death, it seems, has other plans for him, and just as the last good memory fades on Wilbur's tongue (he is gazing over the hours-old nation of L’manberg, with everyone he loves by his side, watching the sun rise on his legacy from its weathered stone walls), things sour. 

He plunges down, without warning, like the walls have been chipped away in an instant by a thousand guilty pickaxes under the watchful gaze of a maniac tyrant. This is the bad part, Wilbur knows. Volleys upon volleys of arrows raining down on his back as he escapes the disaster of his own making. Watching his son, his pride and joy, tear down the walls - _walls he’d built to keep them safe_ \- God had a sense of humor, after all. Before all that - a land pocked with a string of explosions, the accusations against a guilty traitor. A sword through the heart and a knife in the back, and none of it was meant to be. Disaster and tragedy alike dance to the tune of his last moments alive. 

_I’d take it all back_ , he thinks. _I’d redo it all if I could_. All sinners are like that - repentant the instant they face their unmakings, Wilbur supposes, but there’s no harm in hoping the Almighty will make a special exception for him. 

“Please, please, please,” he sobs. The words tear themselves out of his throat, syllable by wretched syllable as Wilbur Soot begs God, Satan, Dream, anyone. 

_Just let me forget. I’ll take it all back, start over with a clean slate. Just let me forget._

Someone must have been listening. 

Someone had to have been listening. 

He chokes past lungfuls of bitter dirt and a headstone half-obscured by saplings. At his translucent feet, a single wilted cornflower. Wilbur Soot, back by some divine cruelty to haunt the people he so loved in life. 

He wears a yellow sweater, yellow like the sun and steaming egg tarts that would burn the roof of his mouth and the wispy hair of his best friend, Niki. It’s a far cry from gunmetal grey and traitor’s trench coat brown, and he finds he rather likes it that way. 

Wilbur - no, Ghostbur - picks up the cornflower. It crushes easily in the palm of his hands, staining the paper thin edges of thumbs and wrists a deep blue. 

_Who am I?_ He wonders. There are a few pleasant moments that bubble up at the surface of his mind - a photo of him and Tommy, honey bottles and golden afternoons with Tubbo, bedraggled and broken feathers and a wax burn and Techno, and a hand outstretched through years of unconditional love from Phil. Ghostbur reaches further and regrets it. He recoils away from the bad things, and soon they disappear altogether. There, all better.

Wilbur Soot opens his eyes to a nation reborn from festival ashes for the first and the last time. He drinks in the sights of land he’s burned to the ground in a past life and thinks, _I will make my home here._

**Author's Note:**

> i am so sleep-deprived lol thank u for reading!!! big huge thank you to @lieyuu for transcribing the Wimblr Soomt Death Rambles In the Crazy Cave for me, italics n all, and to @fensandmarshes and @aerine9 on twitter for looking over this before i posted it <3 comments n/or kudos make me smooth brain SO fucking much serotonin happy juice also bug me on twitter @thepaperbones1 or @thepaperbones on tumblr (ia there). consider checkin out uhhhh andthentheybow and arochill for more fics like this1! n uhhhh idk subscribe or read my other works if you rly liked this (or don't either way is cool dw) pogchamp peace out dudes


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